As the World Wide Web exploded with millions of sites it became tedious to surf to each site especially in the age of Dial-Up. Hence Site Feeds were invented to push content to your desktop. Instead of using a browser to fetch each site content individually viewers subscribed to Posts Atom as in Blogger Blogs and read all the content in a Feed reader.

LOGIN TO GOOGLE READER

Google Reader is an online feed aggregator where you only need a free Google Account to access it. For this get an account and go to http://www.google.com/reader in your browser.

ADD OR SUBSCRIBE TO FEEDS

To subscribe to a site feed go to that site in your browser and look for the orange feed icon such as the one at the top of the middle column in this blog. Just click on this and the feed will open in Google Reader. You can also right click the orange icon and select 'Copy link shortcut'. Then in Google Reader click on +Add Subscription link in the left pane and paste the feed url there and OK it. Blogspot blog feeds have the following links :

NEXT BOOKMARKLET

The Next Bookmarklet can be used to navigate to the next unread item in your reading list and marks it as read. To get it go to the Settings Page. Under Goodies tab click and drag the Next button to your bookmark bar.

GOOGLE READER IN iGOOGLE

You can add Google Reader to your personalized Homepage. This will enable you to see updates at a glance. Just click this button to do so :

GOOGLE READER MOBILE

To get Google Reader on your data phone point your mobile phone's browser to www.google.com/reader/m. You can also go to iGoogle (Personalized Home) and access the Google reader Gadget if you have installed it beforehand.

GO OFFLINE WITH GOOGLE GEARS

First install Google Gears. Then click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader. This will download your latest items so that they're available when you are offline.

LABEL/TAG YOUR FEED SUBSCRIPTIONS

Under the Tags tab in Google Reader settings you can add tags to your feeds and make them public or private. Simply hit g then l to bring up the label selector. Then begin labeling an individual item, by hitting the L key on your keyboard.

SUBSCRIBER COUNT

The number of subscribers to your feed is available at Feedburner. To increase the number add a ADD TO GOOGLE button to your site. For example click on this to subscribe to this blog :

PUT A CLIP ON YOUR SITE

Add a clip of items from your Google Reader to your site. This has two advantages : It adds content to your site. It enables you to share your items with your viewers. To do this go to Put a Clip on your site. Click the Add to Blogger button or copy and paste the code given.

MONITOR YOUR READING TRENDS

You can monitor your reading trends by going to the Trends page. This shows the number of subscriptions, read items, starred items and shared items.

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comments:

Do you know how to insert google reader (or furl) shared items AS individual blog posts? I dont want to add a new sidebar, but would love to add quick entries to my blog sharing links to the stuff I find online ...Thanks!

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Comments posted on Dummies Guide to Google Blogger (Beta) are moderated and will be approved only if they are on-topic and not abusive. Try not to include website URLs/links in your comments. You can email me : drbhatns at gmail dot com for any blogging question. Thanks,